Monday, January 6, 2014

Party Animals Part 2 (Tubuai - week #13)

Ia ora na!
Happy New Year everybody! That makes 13 weeks here at Tubuai for me, and 8 months on the mission. Time is just flying, feels like yesterday that Elder Firuu and I just barely came to Tubuai. A lotta weird stuff to say about this week--probably the strangest on my mission.
First of all, good stuff happened--we fixed a baptism this week for the 8th of February! C is this 18 year old dude who is a total stud. Hes spent some good time partying in his days, but he is one of the most honest, truth-seeking guys I've ever met. His whole family is Catholic, and we've been chased off by them a few times. but C has such a desire to know more about Jesus Christ and has been looking into other religions. We told him that that's what we're there for: to bring him unto Christ through the fulness of His restored gospel. He likes to drink and he enjoys his paka (marijuana) but that can be overcome through faith in Christ. We're stoked for this guy.
We've found that we have some good success with the teens here. We just like to be friends with these guys and joke around with them and play soccer with them. This week we started teaching two other brothers, Te and Ta. Ta, who has 24 years, has already taken all the missionary lessons on the island Moorea and has already read the whole Book of Mormon. We were disappointed to hear that he never received a response through his prayers that the Book of Mormon is true, but he agreed to learn from us again and retry. His bro Te, 16 years, is pretty interested and just wants to know if God exists. They participate super well in the lessons, and they're fun to teach. They agreed to be baptized if they receive a testimony that these things are all true. It takes prayer and faith, and miracles can happen!
Sadly, there hasn't been much else going on here on Tubuai. Nothing but parties. Our other investigators, like H and F for example, have been so busy with family over that they have not had the time to have us over for the past 4 weeks. We've passed by many times and encouraged them to keep praying and reading the scriptures. They still come to Church, so that's great! But really, its been tough with everyone super busy. Also, it's been tough with everyone drunk.
With that being said, the drunkenness has only increased since last week. We had some nice drunk dude encounters this week. Lotta beer cans thrown at us, some juicy profanity as well. A good experience was us just on our way home, and in the middle of the street, these two guys are staggering and yelling amongst themselves. they see us and immediately they get in our way and stop us. These guys are seriously in our faces (these are big Tahitian guys, too) with their alcohol in their hands and their eyes pointing in different directions, yelling at us why the heck were we here. We just told em stuff like "we're here to tell you that God loves you!" to spare ourselves from another whiff of alcohol breath. We got away pretty easily. It was a very pleasant experience.

Well, those are my experiences for this week. This next week, I hope I can bring in some more teaching experiences rather than funny drunk guy experiences. But that's just a taste of what I've seen this week. The chaos will end soon.
I love you all, take care and live and love the Gospel and the Lord! A faaitoito!

Elder Ball

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